Friday, 2 December 2016

There is a
great deal to welcome in this week’s joint report
from the Wales Governance Centre and the Electoral Reform Society. Its conclusions – an increase in the
membership and a move to a single class of AM with a more proportional
electoral system - are both things which I’ve supported for many years. Having said that, I don’t agree with everything
that they have to say, particularly when it comes to the proposed number of AMs
– or rather, how that number has been arrived at.

When I first
read the news reports, it struck me that 87 was such a precise number – most previous
discussions have talked about round numbers such as 80 or 100. The reason for arriving at 87 is clear
enough; there are 29 Westminster constituencies, and if we allocate three AMs
to each, we end up with 87. The
mathematics is clear – but how about the logic?
What, for instance, is magic about 3 members per constituency, when 4
would produce an even more proportional result?
Why do all constituencies have to be the same size and have the same
number of AMs? I understand the argument
for equality of representation, but part of the beauty of multi-member constituencies
is that they can have different numbers of representatives if they have
different numbers of constituents.

The problem
that I have with this report is that the outcome is driven by the rather
axiomatic assumption that coterminosity is a good thing; in this case, that
Assembly constituencies should match Westminster constituencies. I’m not convinced about that at all; and the
report itself notes that “there is little
detailed published research of which we are aware on public attitudes to
coterminosity”. I certainly
understand why the political parties would prefer consistent boundaries; years
of experience of the complications of constituency boundaries not being the
same as local authority boundaries means that I am well aware of the
difficulties for parties in trying to organise themselves to fight elections
across different boundaries. And were I
still a party functionary, I’m sure that I’d be arguing for coterminosity.

But does it
matter to the public? I’m not aware of
any strong evidence of that; indeed, given the recent research on people’s
knowledge of the names of their representatives, I’m not sure that it matters
much at all. Insofar as there is a
potential for confusion, it’s most likely to arise if multiple elections are
held on the same day, it seems to me.
And in Scotland, there is already a disconnect between the constituency
boundaries for Westminster and Holyrood – I’m not aware of any evidence that
that has led to the public being seriously confused.

If it doesn’t
matter to the public, why don’t we start by thinking about what we would
ideally do for Wales if we started with a clean sheet of paper? That will, of course, be a matter of opinion,
but given the strong criticism of the new Westminster boundaries for ignoring
historic identities and communities, why should we simply follow suit? What’s wrong, for instance, with having a
single constituency for Cardiff (or Swansea, or Newport) and adjusting the
number of members upwards? What’s the
problem, for our new Welsh democracy, with recognising rurality by having
greater variation in the size of constituencies than is permitted under the new
Westminster rules (after all, many politicians in Wales have already argued for
precisely that in relation to those new Westminster rules)? Or more generally, why do we start from the
implicit presumption that what happens for Westminster is ‘right’, and
everything else has to be built on that foundation?

Now I know that
the report’s authors have held discussions with representatives of all the
parties before publishing their conclusions.
I don’t know what was said in those discussions, of course; but it may
well be that the authors concluded that coterminosity was an essential
requirement for there to be any chance of cross-party agreement on the changes;
that coterminosity is, in other words, a price worth paying in order to get the
two greater prizes of an increase in numbers and a change to the voting system. And actually, if that were the basis of their
conclusion, I’d agree with them. But
that’s a pragmatic argument rather than the one of principle as which it’s
being presented.

Pragmatism may
have to suffice in the short term, but in the longer term, we really need to
free ourselves from the assumption that we have to follow what happens for and
at Westminster.

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Coterminosity on the basis of Westminster boundaries will probably not provide the stability sought as population/electorate demographic by 2020 churn will have put many of the 29 Welsh HoC seats beyond the legally permissible variance. These variances will only widen if the 2020 Review is postponed for partisan political reasons leading to still more radical overhaul sometime in the next decade or so.If stability is the aim then why not opt for coterminousity with the 22 local council areas? For better or worse we seem very unlikely to reach agreement on altering these in the present generation. The general public may not love their local councils, but at least almost all can tell you which one they live in! The optimal number of AMs (whatever that might be) could be set in stone with the precise representation from each LA constituency determined as per the US house of representatives or european parliament on the basis of population with Blaenau Gwent, Merthyr, Ynys Mon et al each returning about a sixth of the number of AMs as Cardiff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Welsh_principal_areas_by_population

I quite like the idea of linking constituencies to local authorities (or multiples thereof bearing in mind that some are so small that they might end up with fewer than 3 members which endangers the relevance of STV), but I'm not entirely convinced that they need to be coterminous with anything else. Part of the point that I was making is that coterminosity hasn't been justified.

I don't follow your logic there at all. The argument for increasing the number from 60 has nothing to do with coterminosity per se, nor does it flow from the chnages to Westminster seats. It flows from the question as to whether 60 members is enough to provide both an executive and proper backbench scrutiny. I accept that not everyone agrees that more are needed, but that argument really has nothing to do with boundaries or what happens elsewhere.

What I was driving at is that there has been no end of navel gazing and earnest debates around the Sennedd over whether 60 is the optimum number of AMs and if so which electoral system to empoly going on ever since 1997 when Davies, Livsey and Wigley made their deal. The only new element is that the HoC constituencies which the Assembly's 40 FPTP seats presently mirror are now (probably) changing for the next GE and reducing in number. The arguments over numbers to my mind bear a disturbing resemblence to the project management delusion that invariably the more people you put onto a team the more speedily they'll get the job done.

Interestingly ex Labour SPAD & PCC candidate David Taylor has also weighed in and no doubt speaks for many in Welsh Labour beyond Cardiff Bay: http://heatst.com/world/this-is-no-time-to-bloat-welsh-politics-even-more/